Peter James Steven
Detransitioner and creator of detrans.ai
Peter James Steven built detrans.ai to do what mainstream artificial intelligence won't: centre the voices of detransitioners in conversations about gender. His work lands with particular urgency in Ireland, where young people increasingly turn to AI chatbots for guidance on gender identity and the HSE is still mapping its clinical response to the Cass Review.
Peter James Steven is a detransitioner who channelled his personal experience into a direct challenge to the AI industry. Troubled by the way large language models trained on mainstream gender-medicine discourse were steering vulnerable young people toward affirmation while sidelining those who later regretted transition, he built detrans.ai — a chatbot whose knowledge base centres the testimonies of detransitioners rather than the affirmative-care consensus that dominates most clinical guidelines and, by extension, most AI training data.
In the Beyond Gender episode detrans.ai: A Counter Narrative (February 2026), Steven joined hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman to explain the thinking behind the project. He described how a teenager in Ireland asking an AI assistant about gender dysphoria is likely to receive responses that treat transition as the self-evident path forward, with little acknowledgement of those who found that path harmful. detrans.ai is his attempt to insert a counter-narrative into the conversational AI space where so many young people now seek guidance — quietly, privately, away from parents and clinicians.
For Irish audiences the timing is pointed. The HSE is developing its approach to paediatric gender services in the wake of the Cass Review, and schools across the country are still working out how to handle gender identity questions among students. Steven's core argument — that AI tools function as de facto health advisors for young people and must therefore reflect a fuller range of outcomes — speaks directly to debates Irish parents, clinicians and policymakers are only beginning to have in earnest.
His project represents a growing strand of post-transition advocacy that reaches beyond personal testimony into the technological infrastructure shaping how the next generation understands gender. By building an AI tool rather than simply speaking at conferences, Steven is meeting young people on the terrain where the conversation is actually happening.
